Learn about what others have chosen to study and do through this innovative program.
MFA 2021
Arma Yari is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New York. She received her M.F.A in Visual Arts from York University and her B.F.A in Photography from OCAD University and is currently a student of Electronic Arts (PhD) program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Arma’s approach is based on blending disciplines of art, technology and engineering, and the incorporation of both social issues, philosophical theories and scientific methodologies that revolve around the notions of perception and reality. She is frequently interested in creating immersive spaces that lead a momentary expansion of consciousness, which allows one to recapture a sense of wonder, through adopting temporary freedom from our habitual perceptions and culturally-biased assumptions about being in the world.
Colwyn Griffith has exhibited nationally and internationally, including, Mitaka Arts Centre, Tokyo, Jersey City Museum, New Jersey and Le Mois de la Photo Montreal. He has received several grants from the Canada council for the Arts and has participated in an artist residency with Chashama in New York City. His work has appeared in various magazines and books such as Image and Imagination; edited by Martha Langford, McGill-Queens University Press 2005 and Carte Blanche 1: Photography; Magenta Foundation 2006 and Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada 2 Toronto: Douglas & Macintyre 2004.
MFA 2022
Jasmine Canaviri is a text-ile and tactile installation-based artist operating west-bound of the GTA. She uses text, words, and language rooted in her lived experience on a variety of materiality — such as on windows, rugs, pillowcases, and cardstock paper. Her work focuses on memory and trauma while employing the use of narrative storytelling and play to encourage viewers to touch, feel, and interact with her work. Canaviri’s exploration of vibrant colours invite viewers in as her jarring words (when pieced together or through repetition) provides a complete picture of the artist, her life, and her habits.
MFA 2021
Jes is a non-binary educator and mixed media sculpture artist based in Toronto, Canada. Their practice investigates alternative uses of space inspired by infestations and repetitive natural patterns. They practice fluidity within all things. Young received their Masters of Fine Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours, and Bachelor of Education from York University. They have held a guest artist position at York University and has exhibited in multiple group and solo shows in and around Toronto such as the Litter Art Program with A Greener Future (2022) and Something Creative’s Bi Bi Baby Showcase (2022). Alongside continuing to develop their artistic practice they are currently working as a studio manager and the lead fabricator for Cybele Young.
PHD 2021
Jonathan Scott is an artist, writer and scholar working in fictioning. His practice-based research draws on art writing, diagrammatics in art and object making. It functions to define the term ‘Devolved Sculpture’ and uses parafictional modalities to expand the potentials of subjectivity within art academia. Scott received his PhD in Visual Arts from York University in 2021 and holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, UK. His teaching is focused on the fictive processing of information as an essential method of contemporary art production, and taught in the drawing department of York University from 2015 until 2021. Scott has been awarded several scholarships and grants, including from Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Henry Moore Foundation, Ontario Arts Council and Scottish Arts Council. His work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including at Muherin, Toronto/New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; Impakto Galeria, Lima; Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow; Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm; and the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art.
MFA 2010
Kate McQuillen is a Chicago–based artist working mainly in print and installation. In the past year, she has received numerous residencies, in the U.S. and abroad: Ox-Bow School of Art (Michigan), Open Studio Printmaking Center (Toronto), Frans Masereel Center (Belgium), and the Columbia College Center for Books & Paper Arts (Chicago). She has exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Boston, and Chicago. McQuillen’s work explores iconic American technologies with roots in military research, and how they relate to American culture and identity.
www.katemcquillen.com
MFA 2022
Lisa Cristinzo is a queer painter and installation artist and first-generation Canadian settler living in Tkaronto, on Turtle Island. Cristinzo’s work investigates the by-products of humanity and their mythic significance, through large-scale paintings that traverse natural history, climate hazards, materialism, and magic. She has a BFA in drawing and painting from OCADU and an MFA from York University. Since 2007, she has managed several arts programs and community cultural hubs across the city of Toronto through her work with Toronto Artscape Inc Artscape, including managing, Artscape Gibraltar Point, an artist residency, and event space on Toronto Island. She has exhibited locally and internationally since 2004 and had her solo MFA thesis exhibition, Stone like Fruit, Fruit like Fire, at Gales Gallery at York University this past April 2022.
PhD 2021
Maryam Karimi is a graduate of the doctoral degree in philosophy, practice-based Ph.D. in visual arts at York University. She completed a Master's degree in Architecture (M.Arch.) and a Bachelor's in Architectural Science (B.Arch. Sci) from the University of Waterloo. Maryam's Ph.D. dissertation focused on the possibilities of registering a frame of consciousness parallel to the transitioning technologies of governance. She explores the immaterial modalities of light to conceive spatial diagrams that visualize the ongoing narrative of bodies entangled in the surveillance mechanisms of the new techno capitalist market machinery. Maryam's studio practice encompasses architectural design, sculptures, objects, and public installations.
MFA 2022
Michelle Peraza is an Ontario based emerging artist of Cuban and Costa Rican descent. As a second-generation female Latin American Canadian painter, she explores the Latinx identity through large-scale portraits and figure paintings of individuals close to her, people often unseen in the history of the painted portrait due to their ethnicity. Portraiture allows her to render it a site for addressing issues of race, culture, tradition, value systems, colonial structures and decolonial praxis. Michelle holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting as well as a degree in Classical Studies from Western University. Her education in antiquity continues to influence her classical aesthetic and highly realistic interpretation to the human face and body. Michelle recently completed the MFA program at York University with the support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her work continues to explore the complexity of the LatinX experience through a painting and drawing practice.
MFA 2019
Miles Ingrassia is a Toronto-based artist working in a variety of media, including printmaking, collage, text-based works, digital media, and installation. 2019 he will be showing at Nuit Blanche out of 401 Richmond's Urbanspace gallery.
PHD 2020
Nava Messas-Waxman is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Her practice engages identity, memory, liminality, and notions of the body as an archive. Being born into a Moroccan, Judeo-Amazigh immigrant family has shaped her interest in themes of movement, migration, time, and space while delving into the transitory nature of gestures, often embedded within complex artistic, cultural, and personal registers. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from York University and her BA in Social Science & Communication from The Open University of Israel. Recent projects include "Shared-View" commissioned by ArtworxTO, "Variations on Broken Lines" (Gales Gallery, York University, 2020), and "Choreographed Marks" (The Varley Art Gallery of Markham, 2019). In 2019, Messas-Waxman was awarded the Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and is a recipient of awards from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
PhD 2020
Nicole Clouston is a practice-based researcher currently completing her Ph.D. in Visual Art at York University in Toronto. In her practice, she asks: What happens when we acknowledge, through an embodied experience, our connection to a world teeming with life both around and inside us? Nicole has exhibited across Canada in Montreal, Victoria, Edmonton, and Toronto, as well as internationally in New York City, Buffalo, and most recently Santander, Spain. She has been the artist in residence at the Coalesce Bio Art Lab at the University at Buffalo and is currently the artist in residence at Idea Projects: Ontario Science Centre’s Studio Residencies at MOCA in Toronto.
Risa Horowitz has lived and worked as a visual artist, writer, educator and gallery programmer in seven Canadian provinces, and has exhibited in galleries including Plug In ICA, The Saidye Bronfman Centre, The Mendel Art Gallery, artist-run-centres, and in Australia, the UK, and Brazil. Reviews of her work have appeared in the Globe & Mail and BlackFlash, while her critical writing has been published in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and C-Magazine. Risa has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and received the K.M. Hunter award for excellence in Visual Arts in 2006.
MFA 2022
Shawn Grey is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in connection and transformation. Using elements of collaboration, video, and narrative, Shawn’s work documents the everyday as a way to locate the unsaid and overlooked stories found in our day-to-day lives. Her 2022 MFA thesis project, When Nobody Was Here, documented the collaborative making of a 45-foot cloth banner. The project arrived at its own unplanned narrative drawn from a collection of everyday experiences. Shawn facilitates participatory art events focused on sharing knowledge, history and experience. Her video montage , Occupied Acknowledgements was screened at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in 2019. Shawn lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, taking inspiration from the city’s urban land and soundscapes.
Troy David Ouellette completed his PhD at York University in 2014. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Windsor and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has taught Design, Sculpture, and undergraduate courses at various universities and colleges in Southern Ontario and was the Sculpture Facilitator at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff Alberta, Canada from 1999 until 2005. His work has been included in several solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States.
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